Review of the Amazon Echo Dot

I got my husband three Amazon Echo Dots last Christmas, and now that we’ve had them for four months, I’m ready to share our experience. Why three of them? Well, they’re small, and they’re cheap. They usually sell for $49.99, but they often go on sale for $39.99. With three of them, we have one in our bedroom, his office, and our living room/kitchen area. Some people actually carry one around in their purse, since they can be used with any wi-fi. From what I’ve learned online, the only difference between the more expensive Echo and the cheaper Echo Dot is the sound quality. However, you can easily plug the Dot into a speaker. You can spend $179.99 on the Echo for a better speaker, or you can buy a bunch of Echo Dots for the same price and use whatever speakers you already own. That way you can have access to the Echo in more than one room of your home.

I basically needed a gift for Christmas and decided on the Echo Dots after watching a few videos. My husband knew nothing about them when he opened his present, and he didn’t even set them up until a few weeks later, after he did a little research on his own.

That leads us to the month of January, with a new gadget in our open kitchen and living area. With three children, things quickly got annoying, and I learned that voice command is both a blessing and a curse. My nine-year-old son continuously played It’s Raining Tacos and Pen Pineapple Apple Pen. Every time he walked into the room he said, “Alexa, play…” It got to the point I was singing It’s Raining Tacos in my head continuously. And I didn’t like it!

It seems my thirteen-year-old daughter has a wild sense of music style, and she shared it each time she entered the room. My fifteen-year-old daughter just played loud and hard music to annoy me, even though she doesn’t even like it. My husband, who hardly ever listens to music, often played jazz in the background. I like jazz, but we have a different taste in that genre. After a week of listening to his music while in bed at night, I started telling Alexa to play something else. Then I would hear, “It’s my gift. You bought it for me.” Things got pretty interesting each night in our bedroom. I will admit to randomly saying, “Alexa, play whale sounds,” while we were trying to fall asleep. I also learned that my husband likes Marvin Gaye. It’s amazing what happens when you get a voice activated gadget in your room.

Oh, and then there was the night my children tortured me with Barney and Irish heavy metal folk songs. My husband was on a business trip, and later that night, the Dot kept coming on to play a Barney song while I was in bed trying to read. I thought my children had broken it with all the songs they had tortured me with, although that Dot was the one in the living room. However, my husband called, and I learned he figured out how to turn the Dot on while in a hotel room far away. He saw that the children had been playing Barney, so he kept turning it back to that. He would wait about ten minutes before doing it, so it took me a while to get bothered.

Luckily, the newness wore off within a month, and everyone stopped giving Alexa a command every time they entered the kitchen. Since that was the worst of it, we got off easy. It seems one little girl made the news when she told Alexa to buy a doll house and a large box of expensive cookies, costing her parents quite a lot of money. I don’t know if my husband set the Echo up to make purchases from Amazon, but I’m thinking he would use a password if he did.

For me, I love that I can give a voice command to time my tea or cooking while in the kitchen, and I can add to our grocery list when I notice we’re low on something. I also like that I can ask about the weather and set a morning alarm without any hassles. It’s also helped with some of the children’s homework when we’re struggling to find an answer. Overall, it makes life a bit easier, but it still has a long way to go before becoming awesome. The majority of the questions we ask can’t be answered, and I’m considering buying Google Play just to see if that’s better. It’s good for simple things for now, but I predict its capabilities will continue to grow. The future is open to great possibilities.

Oh, and although some people buy the Dot to create a smart home, we haven’t bothered with any of that. That requires extra purchases, and we don’t live in a small apartment. To upgrade our devices, it would cost quite a bit, and we’re not ready just yet.

Have any Alexa stories you want to share? Leave them in the comments below. I’d love to hear 🙂

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